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Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

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Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#461

Post by pimlottc »

hbosch wrote: post #423
zubspace wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This musicleague website is probably the worst landing page I've ever seen. What the heck is it? And why should I log in? What company is behind it? What has it to do with Spotify? What's their target audience? Did they intentionally remove all information on that page? Is it an app for a smart phone? Or maybe I'm just too old..

I agree. No idea what this is or how it benefits me at all, so of course I did not connect my account. From Google for the curious: "Music League is a weekly game which lets you share songs with friends and score points for whoever’s track slaps the most. Each week you’re given a theme, eg. “a song that gets you on the dancefloor”, “a song you’ve loved from this year”, and you have a week to make your submission. The…

Sounds fun to me. At my old work, we used to have "song of the week" contest every Friday, where everyone would post the most ridiculous, over the top, goofy videos of actual songs (think Top of the Pops pisstakes, overly earnest power ballads, hair metal, bad 90s fashions, etc) and everyone would vote for their favorite. There were some pretty amazing selections.

I do agree that their landing page is pretty lacking.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#462

Post by pnt12 »

gauravphoenix wrote: post #422

Just got this email from Amazon Music- We have some great news for you – going forward, there will be no extra charge for HD as part of your Amazon Music Unlimited subscription. You will continue to have full access to all of your HD content, but at no additional cost. This change will be reflected in your next billing cycle.

Sometimes, the free market does work.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#463

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

dmix wrote: post #451
VT_Dude wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretica Applied Physics and BACCH Labs audition this exact demo -- A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating the musicians playing with the speakers silent and the musicians silently air-playing and with the speakers playing. With a perfect image you literally cannot hear the difference. https://www.theoretica.us/ https://bacch.com/

I found a video in one of those links from Princeton. It's a narrative of this guy developing 3D sound that works in normal 2 channel laptop speakers. It's quite impressive when they demo it. There is a moment around 1:20 that plays flies circling around and my cat next to me didnt care about the normal recording but he stood up with his ears out when the 3d version played. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0…

This is pretty old hat now. IRCAM was experimenting with spatialized sound on a stereo medium already back in the 1990s. The software they came up with was used e.g. for the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Pierre Boulez’s piece Répons where sound is moved around the hall.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#464

Post by antiterra »

varispeed wrote: post #68
cies wrote: post #23

From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…

People don't know what to listen for. The compression artefacts may seem like artistic choice to people rather than a loss of quality. Once you know what to listen for, you can almost always tell the difference, even on lower quality listening devices.

This is true, most of 320kbps is indistinguishable, but high hats are often subject to artifacts, including pre-noise that occurs before the sound is supposed to begin. To some it might sound intentional, like a very subtle reverse high hat or other room effect.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#465

Post by IceWreck »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #38
cies wrote: post #23

From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…

> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself ( https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... ). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the…

I gave these and I can't distinguish between 320kbps and uncompressed.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#466

Post by PostThisTooFast »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #88
alfalfasprout wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself ( https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... ). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the…

> Of course, it's not only the compression that's at stake-- it's also the mastering quality. HN threads on lossless music so often descend into "well, you couldn’t hear the difference". But historically a key reason for people to prefer e.g. SACD releases of recordings is not because one can hear the extra frequencies of this format, but because the SACD release – being targeted at people with a good stereo and sile…

Yep. Dynamic compression has ruined all popular music mastered (or "remastered") since the late '90s.

It's incredible how many people don't understand that the problem isn't data compression, but rather dynamic compression. You have guys like Neil Young and Bob Dylan railing against how shitty music sounds now, but then promoting super-high-bitrate or high-resolution formats. NO! That's not the problem.

We need "HDR" music. It's sad that we have to say this in an era where everyone has the technical means to hear great-sounding music.... and there's none being made.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#467

Post by varispeed »

antiterra wrote: post #464
varispeed wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't know what to listen for. The compression artefacts may seem like artistic choice to people rather than a loss of quality. Once you know what to listen for, you can almost always tell the difference, even on lower quality listening devices.

This is true, most of 320kbps is indistinguishable, but high hats are often subject to artifacts, including pre-noise that occurs before the sound is supposed to begin. To some it might sound intentional, like a very subtle reverse high hat or other room effect.

This and also transients - they sound in a specific way through the way the compression works. Once you hear it, it is difficult to stop paying attention to it.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#468

Post by picardythird »

marcan_42 wrote: post #89
alfalfasprout wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself ( https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... ). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the…

This is largely because MP3 is a crappy, old format. Try high-bitrate Opus on most samples and you're a lot less likely to get above-chance results on an ABX test, pretty much ever, at high bitrates. Ultimately though, lossy compression is always program-dependent ("program" here means the song, not the app). The encoders use psychoacoustic algorithms, and there is no way to prove they will perform well on all sample…

You may find this interesting. The author argues against 96khz+ sample rates, but pegs the optimal rate to be around ~60hkz (which of course doesn’t exist in practice).

http://www.lavryengineering.com/pdfs/lavry-white-paper-the_o...

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#470

Post by karmakaze »

nicoburns wrote: post #314
StrictDabbler wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agreed. People spend so much time arguing about whether we're "past the limits of human perception" on sound or video. They want to quote Nyquist and check frequencies. Spend a million dollars on audio equipment. Turn on your speakers, play some chamber music in insane multi-channel high-res audio, and invite a friend over. Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have…

The more realistic scenario where it might actually make a difference is DJs playing on huge high-end club soundsystems where compression artefacts might not only effect what you can hear, but the reverberations you can physically feel, and where there might be post-processing effects applied to the source material that show up the compression artifacts.

Yep, it was a sad day when they switched from vinyl 45 singles to digital.
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